webAppOS: Creating the Illusion of a Single Computer for Web Application Developers Sergejs Kozloviˇcs Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia (Riga, Latvia) Raina blvd. 29, LV-1459, Riga, Latvia
[email protected] Abstract. Unlike traditional single-PC applications, which have access to directly attached computational resources (CPUs, memory, and I/O devices), web applications have to deal with the resources scattered across the network. Besides, web applications are intended to be accessed by multiple users simultaneously. That not only requires a more sophis- ticated infrastructure but also brings new challenges to web application developers. The webAppOS platform is an operating system analog for web appli- cations. It factors out the network and provides the illusion of a single computer, the \web computer." That illusion allows web application de- velopers to focus on business logic and create web applications faster. Besides, webAppOS standardizes many aspects of web applications and has the potential to become a universal environment for them. Keywords: Web Computer · Web Applications · Web Application Op- erating System · webAppOS · Web Application Platform 1 Introduction Babbage and Turing assumed that the computer is as a single device executing one program at a time and operated by a single user. Such a way of thinking is close to the psychology of the human brain since the brain is not able to focus on multiple tasks at the same time. Today, however, multitasking, networking, and multiple concurrent users are common as air. Luckily, modern operating systems implement multitasking, multiuser management, and local resource and device management. This aids in creating single-PC desktop applications, but does not help with web-based applications since the developers still have to think about application-level protocols as well as how to manage resources (CPUs, memory, and I/O devices) scattered across the network.